Android Notes Application Privacy, Declared

Three of the eleven biggest Android notes application listings declare that they collect no data at all. Three others declare that they share your data with third parties. The remaining five sit somewhere in between, and the difference between those three groups is printed on every Play Store page in a box almost nobody opens.

I opened all eleven on 28 July 2026 and wrote down what each one says.

Quick answer. Samsung Notes, Obsidian and Joplin declare no data collected. Evernote, ColorNote and Simplenote declare that they share data with third parties. Google Keep declares eight data types collected but no sharing. None of that tells you whether an app is trustworthy, it tells you what the developer signed their name to, which is a lower bar and still more than a feature comparison gives you.

The Box Under The Screenshots

Google requires every developer to fill in a Data safety section. It has three parts. Whether data gets shared with third parties, which categories of data get collected, and whether the app supports encryption in transit and deletion requests.

Developers write it themselves. Google doesn't audit it by default, though a few apps carry an "Independent security review" badge, and Google Keep is the only one on my list that does.

So it's a declaration, not a finding. A developer who fills it in carelessly produces a clean-looking box, and a developer who fills it in thoroughly can look worse than a less careful competitor. Keep that in mind through everything below, because it cuts both ways and the apps that look worst here might simply be the ones being precise.

Nobody Collects Nothing, Except Three Apps

Those counts are mine. Google's page shows the first two categories and then says "and 6 others" rather than listing them inline, so I added the summary numbers together to get a comparable figure across apps. It's a crude measure of breadth and it says nothing about depth.

The pattern that jumps out is the one you'd expect once you say it out loud. The apps that keep your notes as files on your device declare nothing, because there's nothing going anywhere. Obsidian's notes are Markdown in a folder. Joplin's are local with optional sync you configure yourself. Samsung Notes is preinstalled and talks to Samsung's own services rather than through the Play-declared channels.

The apps that run a service declare more, because running a service means holding accounts, and accounts are personal info by definition.

Location, In A Notepad

Three apps on that list declare Location as a collected category. Keep, Zoho Notebook, Evernote.

There are honest reasons for it. Location-based reminders is a real feature in Keep, note geotagging is a real feature in a few others, and an app that offers those has to declare the permission whether you ever use it or not. Evernote has had location metadata on notes for over a decade.

Still, if your mental model of a notes app is a text file with a title, a declaration that includes location is worth noticing. It's the sort of thing that never appears in a features table because it isn't a feature, it's a consequence.

I'd check what each app is actually doing with it before getting annoyed. The declaration is a category, not an accusation.

Sharing And Collecting Are Different Verbs

Simplenote is the interesting row here, and it's the one that surprised me.

Simplenote declares only two collected data types, which puts it among the leanest on the list, and it also declares that it shares app info and performance with third parties. So on one axis it's better than nearly everything and on another axis it's in the group with Evernote and ColorNote.

That's not a contradiction. Sharing app info and performance almost certainly means a crash reporting or analytics service, which is a normal thing for a small team to use, and it's a very different claim from sharing the contents of your notes. Google's categories are coarse enough that "shares data" spans both.

Which is my main complaint about this whole disclosure system. It's better than nothing by a wide margin. It's also blunt enough that a careful reader can end up more confused than an incurious one, and the confusion is not evenly distributed, because the apps with lawyers write the most careful boxes.

The Free Plan That Is Actually A Device Plan

There's a limit in this category that has nothing to do with privacy and catches more people than any of the above.

Evernote's own plan comparison lists the free tier as 50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 GB of storage, and 1 sync device. One device. On an Android phone that reads as unlimited right up to the moment you open the same account on a laptop, at which point you've spent your only slot.

Compare that with Obsidian, where the app is free without limits and no sign-up, and syncing to a second device is a separate paid add-on at $4 per user per month on annual billing. Same underlying economics, wildly different framing. One vendor caps the free product and sells you out of the cap. The other gives away the product and sells the plumbing.

Joplin does the third version. The app is free and open source, and Joplin Cloud starts at EUR 2.40 per month billed yearly for 2 GB, which is in euros because that's the currency their pricing page served me and I'm not going to convert it and pretend the result is a price.

If you want the longer argument about file ownership versus hosted notes, the Obsidian and Notion comparison works through where each one physically puts your writing.

Leaving Android Entirely

The question behind a lot of these searches is what happens when the phone changes, and specifically when it changes brand.

Samsung Notes is the sharpest case, because it's the best free note app on a Galaxy and it goes with the Galaxy. Samsung's own support page says the app runs on Galaxy phones, tablets and Galaxy Book PCs, and that it's available through Play, Galaxy Store and the Microsoft Store. So a Windows laptop is fine. An iPhone is not, and there's no version of it there.

The export routes Samsung lists are PowerPoint and Word, plus PDF import and annotation, and there's a documented sync with Microsoft OneNote. That OneNote bridge is the one I'd use if I were leaving, since it moves notes into something cross-platform rather than into a pile of Word files. I've written up the whole Samsung situation separately in the Samsung notes app piece.

Google Keep travels better, because it's an account rather than a device. Obsidian and Joplin travel best of all, because there's nothing to migrate. The files are already files.

How I'd Choose Under This Lens

I'd add one caution to the top row. Choosing an app because it collects nothing is only meaningful if you also stop pushing the folder into a cloud drive you didn't read the terms of, which is exactly what most people do about a week later. The app's declaration ends at the app.

What I Actually Use, And Why It's Boring

My notes are Markdown files sitting beside the projects they belong to, in one repository. On a phone that's a text editor pointed at a synced folder, which nobody would call a system.

The honest reason isn't privacy principle. It's that I got burned choosing tools by their entrance rather than their exit, in a completely unrelated way. I had a site sitting at average position 47 in Search Console for months, indexed and invisible, and I spent that whole period polishing the product because polishing felt like work. It wasn't the problem. The problem was that nobody could find the thing.

Ever since, I've been suspicious of any decision that feels productive and produces no output. Reading eleven privacy declarations is arguably that same trap, which I'm aware of while writing this, and I'd say the difference is that this one takes twenty minutes rather than three weeks.

If you want the cost side of the same argument, the productivity apps stack math is where the numbers get uncomfortable.

Questions People Ask

Which Android notes application is the most private? By declaration, Obsidian, Joplin and Samsung Notes, all three of which say they collect nothing. By architecture, Obsidian and Joplin, because your notes are files rather than rows in somebody's database.

Are Google Keep notes encrypted? The Play listing declares data is encrypted in transit and that you can request deletion. That's transport encryption, which is not the same as end-to-end, and I couldn't confirm end-to-end from the pages I loaded, so I'm not claiming it.

Does a "no data collected" declaration mean the app is safe? No. It means the developer said so and Google took their word for it. Three apps on my list carry it and one of them is preinstalled by a phone manufacturer, which is its own conversation.

What's the difference between this and picking by features? Features tell you what the app does for you. The declaration tells you what it does with you. Both matter and only one of them shows up in roundups, which is why I built the table. For the feature-and-rating view of the same shortlist, the notes app for Android comparison covers download counts, ratings and update dates.

Can I check this myself? Yes, and it takes seconds. Open any Play Store listing, scroll to Data safety, tap See details. Every claim in this article came from there.

The Short Version

Read the box. It's four lines long, it's on every listing, and it is the only part of a store page the developer had to think carefully about before publishing.

Then decide whether you're picking an app or picking a service, because that's the actual fork. Everything else in this category is a preference about fonts.